


if there was nowhere to land

by thingswithteeth



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Falling In Love, Gift Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-08
Updated: 2012-07-08
Packaged: 2017-11-09 10:14:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy has always been good at falling. She never even sees the ground coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if there was nowhere to land

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chaerring](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaerring/gifts).



> The lovely Chaerring requested a fic that combined Bruce/Darcy with Florence + The Machine, two of her loves. Only belatedly did I realize I totally could have just sent Darcy and Bruce to a concert. Ah, well. Title taken from and fic loosely based on the song "[Falling](http://youtu.be/fCapveOCJAo)." Your regularly scheduled Political Science will resume shortly.

            Darcy has always been good at falling. As a kid, she’d pump her legs and lean her body into the forward rush of the swing, or tilt back to look at the sky until the hawthorn branch that hung over the swingset was close enough to touch, close enough that she knew it was time to let go. She never saw the ground coming. She liked it that way, enough to make up for all the scraped knees and sprained ankles she had gotten in the process.

            She falls in love the same way: frequently, recklessly, and with very little regard for the consequences.

            The only problem is that she never falls out of love.

            Ever.

 

*

 

            For a week in kindergarten, Darcy Lewis and Jamal Leonard are girlfriend and boyfriend.

            She soldiers on bravely when he tells her that he’s leaving her for Amanda Owens’ awesome collection of toy trucks.

 

*

 

            In middle school, Darcy falls madly in love with Lee Kingsley. He’s got dirty blond hair and freckles so thick that you can barely see the skin under them. He laughs like a horse having an asthma attack, but he also laughs easily. His upper lip has a scar on it from when he was hit in the face during a kickball game in elementary school, and Darcy has the shape of it traced in her mind in such a way that the memory will never be dislodged, even years later.

            She doodles his name in every one of her notebooks, scribbles it in the margins in gel pen and pencil until she can’t see the blue lines beneath. One day, she uses a unscathed piece of binder paper to write him a note, and passes it to him during recess. He pushes her down so hard that she has a bruise on her hip to show for it the next day.

            This time, the falling hurts.

 

*

 

            The later half of puberty changes a lot for Darcy. Her curves come in, hips and breasts covering the raw edges of her. When she asks Mike Chapel to take her to the movies during her sophomore year of high school, he smiles and jots down her number. His friends hoot and whistle, but he waves them off.

            He works long hours at one of the local bowling alleys, and his skin always smells faintly of spilled beer and the disinfectant they use to clean the shoes. His mouth tastes like cinnamon, and Darcy can’t keep her hands off of him.

            When she loses her virginity to him in his parents’ rec room, it’s clumsy and a little awkward, but she doesn’t regret it. She still doesn’t regret it six months later, when he breaks up with her, and she never does throw out the notebook with his name written in it.

 

*

 

            “What’s this?” Alice asks, and Darcy isn’t embarrassed when her roommate holds up a notebook. The page it’s open to has _Mrs. Doctor Paul Isherwood_ written inside a little heart. She shrugs, because it’s a habit she’s gotten into and never really fallen out of, and this is hardly the first or the worst time someone has spotted the evidence.

            “Just something I do,” Darcy says with a laugh. “every time I’m crushing on someone. I get a little obsessive. I mean, not like I’m gonna go all _Fatal Attraction_ on Doctor Isherwood, or anything, but there’s that.” She waves vaguely at the notebook. “Silly, huh?”

            “I think it’s sweet,” Alice says. Her voice is a husky rasp from the cigarettes that she leans out their dorm window to smoke, even though the RA would kill her dead if she ever got found out. When she leans closer and slides a slender-fingered hand into Darcy’s hair, Darcy doesn’t pull away. The kiss is hot and a little messy, and Alice ends up with Darcy’s lipstick across her mouth. She laughs, her slanted dark eyes gleaming in the dim light of the lamp on Darcy’s desk.

            They move to Alice’s bed eventually. Alice is small and lean over Darcy, and she giggles when Darcy brushes a hand over a ticklish spot just below the band of her bra. She’s still in her jeans, and when she grinds her hips down, the rub of her zipper against the thin, damp fabric of the panties Darcy has on draws a little whine from Darcy’s throat.

            It’s awkward in the morning, but they adjust. Darcy is willing to admit that having a college roommate that she not only is friends with but occasionally has amazing sex with is pretty damn awesome.

            At the end of the year, Alice moves to off-campus housing with a couple of people she knows from high school. She doesn’t invite Darcy to come with her.

            In the semester they live together, Alice never finds the copy of The Federalist Papers left over from Darcy’s freshman seminar, the one that has Alice’s name scrawled in the margins on every other page. Darcy wonders if things would have gone differently if she had.

 

*

 

            There’s a crumpled coffee shop napkin with the name _Eleanor_ written on it with the _o_ replaced by a heart, a book with _John_ and a number. There are others before and after and between, and Darcy never has to look at any of them because each pen stroke is seared on her brain and written into the corners of her heart. She meets _this_ one when they share a cab from the airport one year when Darcy returns to campus after spring break, and she starts talking to _that_ one after they plant a tree together for some big Earth Day event. They stay on their scraps of loose paper and their separate pieces of memory, and none of them ever really leave, like houseguests overstaying their welcome but too beloved to be told to depart.

 

*

 

            When Jane asks Darcy to go to Norway and then to New York with her, Darcy goes. She goes because the months following Thor’s departure have tied them together tighter than two such dissimilar women should be bound, interwoven them in all the tubs of ice cream and the late night trips into the desert and the smell of the sun baking the earth until it cracked, and she loves Jane. Not like she’s loved the others, but she loves her all the same, and Darcy has never been the one to let go first.

 

*

 

            From the time Darcy meets Doctor Bruce Banner, she knows he’s a runner. He walks like he’s stepping on pins and he won’t meet her gaze for the first three days after they’re introduced, but he watches her when he thinks she isn’t looking. Usually, Darcy wouldn’t want a man scared of his own shadow, but she thinks it’s pretty understandable when his shadow is huge and green and able to shred concrete as easily as Darcy could shred the pieces of paper she’s accumulated over the years, if she ever felt the desire to do so.

            He’s going to run, and she doesn’t even care.

            She makes the first move, and when he doesn’t run right then and there she thinks maybe that’s enough. His hands are large and warm where they skim up her sides under the loose bulk of her sweater, and there’s something demanding and almost desperate to the hard press of his mouth against her own.

            When Darcy wakes up in his bed the next morning, her cheeks feel raw from his stubble and her muscles loose and a little sore in a way she’s come to identify with a night well spent. He’s tracing the line of her arm where it lies sprawled across the sheets, the curve of her hip. He stops as soon as he realizes she’s awake.

            “That was probably a mistake,” he says.

            She rolls over and presses a smirking kiss into the edge of his jaw. “I make all the best mistakes.”

 

*

 

            He’s going to run, and that’s okay. Darcy has never been much for anticipating the sting before the bandaid is ripped off.

            It’s like when she was a kid. She never looked for the ground rushing up to meet her.

            She still knew that it was there.

 

*

 

            Only maybe this time, it isn’t.


End file.
